Load hauling machine fleets are frequently used for hauling material throughout work sites. In large open mining sites, in remote forests or on large-scale construction sites, where load hauling machines are used to haul materials—such as ore, coal, logs and building or waste material—from one location to another, haul roads are created for the trucks to travel on and then need to be maintained. Often, these haul roads are located in harsh and constantly changing environments and therefore require constant monitoring and frequent maintenance in order to keep them suitable for the load hauling machines to travel on. Deterioration of the haul roads, road damages or obstacles on the road can cause severe and costly damage to the load hauling machines and slow down the traffic on the road.
In the paper “The development of a real-time mine road maintenance management system using haul truck and road vibration signature analysis” by Thompson, Visser, Miller, and Lowe (published in “The Journal of The South African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy”, June 2003), a similar method is described, where a triaxial accelerometer is placed on the vehicle to analyze the road condition and to allow running a road maintenance management system efficiently.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,736,939 A discloses another device and method for use with load hauling machines for use on mining sites. Therein, the condition of the wheels and other parameters are monitored to determine the condition of the road.
In both approaches, when a vehicle runs through a pothole or over a rock on the road, this event is recorded together with the position, e.g. determined by means of GPS. Then a warning can be issued to other vehicles and road maintenance can be informed about the road defect, so that the pothole or rock can be removed quickly.
However, in neither of the above mentioned documents, the human factor is taken into account sufficiently. If a road damage or obstacle on the road, e.g. a pothole or rock on the road, has a certain size, so that on the one hand it is big enough for the driver of a vehicle to see it in due time before hitting it, and on the other hand is small enough so that it is possible to avoid hitting it, the driver could try to avoid hitting the obstacle and, if possible, rather steer the car around it. Although this behaviour may prevent damage to the car and/or damage or partial loss of the load, it may however still be time-consuming, especially if repeated often. What is more, with the available methods, no event is triggered if the obstacle is avoided, so that the road surface defect is not reported, other drivers cannot be warned and the defect will not be repaired.